


and I alone am left to tell thee

by historymiss



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Oneshot, Zombie Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:40:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29566941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: ‘It is a poor use of a friend, to make him a nightmare’Dedicated with love to my friend and fellow cannibal Victorians and drone aficionado Johnny.
Relationships: Francis Crozier/James Fitzjames
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	and I alone am left to tell thee

Francis is never alone on the ice. The night, now, full of voices, wheezing and deadly as the Arctic wind. Figures in the black. Some he can name, some he cannot. Some merely huge, slinking figures in the dark.

They call to him. He does not answer them, though he wishes to, badly. 

Save for one.

It is not long before he comes. Francis watches him lurch and stutter across the stones, his coat crow-black against the landscape. His hair is lank and falls dull against his cheeks, and when he gets close, Francis can smell the rotten blood leaking at every step.

It is a poor use of a friend, to make him a nightmare.

Francis looks at the spear in his hands and thinks instead of Britannia, or Caesar, or whoever he was supposed to be in that damned tent.

He thinks of the smell of wool and canvas, and he tilts his chin up, sets it like a captain, and is rewarded with the brush of chapped and bloody lips against his own. The taste of decay, metallic-sweet and lingering.

James speaks to him in English, for that is the language of ghosts. 

“You are not gone, then, Francis.”

Francis does not open his eyes. He does not need to, for he can feel the whole company of the dead pressing to him on all sides, out here beyond everything, in the endless dark.

He knows, now, that he was speaking to the dead for years. 

“Not while you are here.”


End file.
